


7.06: Over the Well-Fought Field

by idlesuperstar



Series: The Crooked Roads [6]
Category: Spooks | MI-5
Genre: Canon levels of violence, M/M, dubcon (past/ambiguous/implied)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-13
Updated: 2016-11-13
Packaged: 2018-08-30 19:30:04
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,591
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8546215
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/idlesuperstar/pseuds/idlesuperstar
Summary: There will always be days like this, days when he does his best and still fails. This is the way of the world.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Series notes are [here](http://archiveofourown.org/series/136827). 
> 
> This is a sidelong look at ep 7:06 from Lucas' brainpan. If you've not seen the ep then it won't make much sense. Go and watch that instead. 
> 
> Title from William Blake's [ _A War Song To Englishmen_](http://www.bartleby.com/235/23.html). Intertitles are Proverbs of Hell from [ _The Marriage of Heaven and Hell_](http://www.bartleby.com/235/253.html).

 

_Truth can never be told so as to be understood, and not be believe'd._

 

Harry is not one for storytelling, usually. Lucas is listening, obviously, but he’s wondering at the gravity in Harry’s voice. Where Harry is leading them. Why it’s only the three of them.

‘Operation Sugarhorse’ Harry says, and suddenly this history lesson is _relevant_. ‘Which has remained entirely uncompromised.’

‘Until I told you the Russians had interrogated me about it,’ Lucas says, staring in dawning horror, thinking _holy fucking christ if I was Jim Prideaux for real, does that mean -_

‘ - I will expose the identity of a mole within MI5, a traitor, who is trying to sabotage a twenty year operation.’

Beneath the shock of it, this thing out of the cold war, out of spy fiction, Lucas realises he feels relief, of a kind.

That it was for something _huge._  

And that he can _do_ something. ‘Whatever you need,’ he says, without a qualm.

 

He and Ros leave in their own silences. Somewhere in this building, possibly, is the person who sold him out to Arkady.

It feels impossible, in the light of day; one of his midnight fears become real.

Except, in the worst of his nightmares, it is always Harry who has betrayed him. And unless Harry is a greater dissembler than even Smiley, this has been seismic for him, too.

 

~

 

The roof of Thames house has no glamour in the daytime; the grime of the city evident wherever he looks, but he needs to steal this solitude, just for a moment.

He can choose, here. Trust is a choice, sometimes. Much more so than loyalty, than love.

_All the love I have is in my mind._

Here it is then. He trusts Harry. He - in _this_ thing - believes him.

The decision settles, slackening his muscles, permeating his bones.

A release he hadn’t realised he needed.

He thinks of Oleg. Of how the storm inside him has abated, now he has chosen to accept his, their, thrall.

How it’s brought a soundness, now, that he’d been missing since he got back. Different to how he was - _before,_ but no less honest.

_Happiness_

_More or less_

 

* * *

 

He finds his way to the address Ros gives him with little difficulty.

Marvels again at the butting-up of history in this city; sixties brutalist tower blocks against Dickensian quays.

A cynic would think there little change under the surface, from the riverside slums to this crumbling concrete. Squalid housing for squalid lives.

Lucas knows better. Knows that filth permeates the high places as much as here.

Dickens would, however, be amazed at what you can get on ebay these days.

 

~

 

He knows he’s been more tense, more alert, since Harry’s history lesson that morning, but the cars gathering outside scream security operation in a way that jangles his nerves. Whatever this toy of Dean’s is, it’s getting far too much attention.

Between the call to Ros and the sight of a gun, he’s clicked smoothly from inoffensive civilian to defensive agent, assessing exits and threats without consciously thinking of it.

He would be out of there already were it not for the boy and his mum, but he can’t leave them. Having to explain to her is slowing them down, but he bites his tongue.

Thinks of what it is like to be scared and confused. How to shut it down.

A firm hand and a steady voice.

_Very good, Lucas._

It’s a messy scramble to get away, made harder by the panic leaking from her.

But Lucas has a team to call on. He doesn’t have to do this alone.

The relief of that is cut short by Ros changing plans mid-sentence, making his hackles rise. Whoever is after them, they’re clever.

‘I don’t understand,’ Dean’s mum says, and Lucas wishes briefly for a life without civilians; understands for once the urge for the military - to give orders and be followed without question.

‘Understanding’s overrated, just do it,’ he growls, and prays that they get past whatever’s out there.

Not for the first time he thinks _if Oleg didn’t kill me, no-one gets to._

It’s more comforting than it should be.

 

* * *

 

Shopping centres make him antsy, even when he’s not on the run from unknown assassins with guns.

He sends Dean’s mum off with the cash he got back from Dean - the kid’s all tv and no reality. He doesn’t need her here for this. He senses that Dean wouldn’t talk in front of her, and she would only be a distraction.

‘You had in your possession classified military hardware.’

‘Found it on the street,’ Dean flips back, casual and cocky. The boy is scared of something, but he’s long learned to cover his weaknesses.

Lucas thinks of all the ways he could break him. All the things he learned. Dean has no fucking idea who he is dealing with.

And he wants to talk. Lucas can see it in him, see it’s all too much for him to keep in; Dean’s arm under his hand is tense, his eyes wary and worried.

He grits his teeth, lets Dean see a fraction of what there is in him.

Dean spills.

He doesn’t even know what he knows, really, but it’s more than enough to endanger them all.

Lucas relaxes his grip, and a man snaps into focus; intent, martial, very out of place.

There’s no time for subtlety. He and Dean run.

The handover with Jo is swift and secure, Lucas trusting to Malcolm to never forget a code. The other attacker is easily dispatched. Lucas has no time to worry about how it looks, gets them to the car. Who knows how many more there are.They’re bloody organised.

 

~

 

‘Not quite the Savoy, I’m afraid,’ he says, off hand, scanning the house for weak points.

Dean doesn’t trust him yet, but he’s more relaxed. He can use that, puts him to work.

He tries the same with Sarah but she’s close to crumbling.

‘If anything happened to him - ’ she says, fierce but trembling, and then, voice shaking, ‘please tell me nothing’s going to happen to him.’

Lucas thinks of all the things he can’t control in this; knows there are many outcomes and no guarantees, how she is asking the impossible.

How she just wants to hear that they’ll be safe, even if it’s a lie.

‘I swear to you, everything is going to be fine,’ he says, mustering all the reassurance he can.

He hopes she believes him.

Hopes he’s believable.

She quietens, nods, accepts his word. Or pretends to.

What difference is there, anyway?

 

* * *

Lucas has kept watch in many places, on many nights. Has catalogued all the different sounds of waiting, from the atavistic sweep of the tide to the chink of glass and drunken shouts of the never-dark city.

The fridge hums erratically, overlaying distant cars and the faint rustle of wind in sparse trees. Easy, familiar sounds to lull him. It’s the unfamiliar that will spark his senses.

He shifts in his sleeping bag, mute pain radiating across his shoulder blades from the too-hard floor.

Remembers how when he first got back, his bed was too soft, how he fought so hard to sleep; how dragging bedclothes to the floor, searching for the familiar, was a hated surrender, born of desperation.

The ache in his hip now tells him how far he’s come. He should be thankful for that.

 

~

 

_Sugarhorse._

It’s been lurking on the shadows of his mind all day, though he’s been avoiding those dark corners.

Sometimes he forgets those years before Oleg. A blur of faces, _\- interrogators -_ never fully formed. Ciphers. Shades.

Astonishing, really, that four years of torture, of degradation, of all the clever indignities the FSB can conceive of, can fade into ghosts and whispers, bleached out by the blaze of Oleg’s intensity.

 

He thinks of Arkady, and the retribution the FSB can wield one of their own.

Is he, now, at the hands of those faceless ones? ( _Is he at Oleg’s hands?_ )

Wonders if Harry still has that sliver of doubt about his own return.

Wonders what Harry knew of who betrayed Lucas.

An unending matroshka of suspicion and uncertainty, unfolding in these secret night dark moments, when his will weakens.

It will ruin him, if he lets it.

He’s already ruined enough, he knows.

 

~

 

He wakes, eyes widening into the dark of the room, breath held, listening intently for what alerted him.

There. Cats yowling, unholy witch cries.

He breathes out steadily, checks his watch. _5.12._

Just after eight in Moscow.

Is Oleg sitting in his kitchen, drinking a second thick black coffee? (He recalls the smell of it on his breath).

Sleeves rolled up, hunched over papers at the table, making notes. Then - yes - leaning back in his chair, gazing sightlessly through the window.

Distracted from work by - by something sparking in his memory, by the hollowness in his gut.

Thinking of the cogs of Lucas’ naked spine. Of his own hand clutched round Lucas’ bicep, blue ink against white. Of the sweet stale smell of the sweat at Lucas’ nape.

Not looking at the empty day ahead.

Wanting to fall.

 

~

 

In the darkness, Lucas presses his left thumb hard into the soft flesh at his carotid, feels his pulse throb, thinks of Oleg’s hands on him hard enough to bruise.

Wants to be marked again, to see in the mirror the signs all over his body.

 

He smooths his hand slowly down his body, pushes steadily into his underwear, curls his hand around his thickening cock. Feels his blood syrupy and warm in his veins.

Finds his centre in this pocket of quiet darkness.

Breathes.

 

Pictures taking his time, pressing methodical bruises into Oleg’s skin.

The crook of his right elbow. The join of his left rhomboid to the T5 vertebra. The point of his left iliac crest, hard under the solid layers of muscle and flesh.

Wants to push his fingers up from the nape of Oleg’s neck to grasp his hair, force his head down with a sharp tug, to bite once, hard, on the left trapezius at his neck.

Oleg’s harsh breath the only sound in the tight silence.

 

Thinks of pricking a knife point to the tender skin at the back of Oleg’s right knee, millimetres from his hamstring. Drawing it lightly over his left achilles tendon.

Tracing - high across the vulnerable skin of his left thigh - the line of the femoral artery.

Feeling the twitch of muscle, the shiver across the skin. The bitten-off groan as he draws the finest of lines up over Oleg’s balls, along his cock. Watching it jump, fatten; listening to Oleg shuddering under him.

 

Feeling the tremors in Oleg’s muscles, the shallow breaths, the taut stillness in him as he is mapped out, every exposed, unprotected part of him. The sour tang of sweat and adrenaline heavy between them.

 

A moment of limbo: Oleg’s eyes black with wanting, Lucas holding him there, deciding.

Weighing his fate.

 

Lucas comes back to himself, only too aware he is cramped up in a sleeping bag in a safe house with his hand on his cock.

He smiles to himself. Not exactly optimum agent behaviour. He knows he can’t finish this.

(His days of wanking in sleeping bags should be long gone).

But he can hold himself in that limbo too. There’s a different pleasure in that.

Later, he promises himself.

 _Later_ , he breathes darkly to Oleg, the knife tip a whisper over his radial artery.

Later.

 

* * * 

 

Lucas debates whether his tea will be worse black or with powdered milk. Things that are within his control are few, today.

Dean looks terrible; sleepless and edgy, his cockiness shrugged on like an ill-fitting coat. Lucas hopes that bad tea and privacy is enough for him to spill a little more.

He expects questions, expects Dean to want to redress the balance, but he’s surprised when Dean asks him where he grew up.

‘You just look like that, like private school and shit,’ Dean says, and Lucas wonders what he would have called _Adam_.

What Adam would have made of Dean. Would have charmed him against his will, probably, the fucker.

He laughs, as much at that as at Dean.

He feels oddly defensive at Dean’s smirk at the bare bones of a life once lived, light years distant from this here, now. Facts conveying nothing of the layers underneath.

A sweet ache, more of nostalgia than of grief, after all this time.

‘He was a good father,’ he says. The quiet truth of it, told to a boy who heard that door shut a long time ago.

 

The air is fragile here, in between the truth and the lies by omission, in between the two of them. Lucas needs to tread warily, needs patience.

‘I’d make a good spy,’ Dean says, studiedly offhand, ‘I lie quite a lot too.’

A bloom of warmth - it’s acceptance of this game they’re forced to play.

 

The knock at the door jerks him out of the tenuous peace they’ve made. Malcolm and Jo have come up trumps.

Dean is honestly confused now, his cockiness gone. In another time Lucas could like this boy, the one under the bolshy front; he’s smart and loyal and doesn’t think the world owes him.

‘They think you still have the rucksack,’ he realises, everything suddenly making sense. There’s something they’re looking for, in that rucksack, and Dean knows where it is.

Sarah’s face is worried as they bundle out of the door.

Lucas wonders when she last felt safe.

Wonders when any of them did.

 

* * *

 

A scrapyard is an ingenious hiding place, but it’s a nightmare in terms of visibility and exits.

‘How fast can you run?’ he asks, grabbing Dean and ditching the rucksack.

Danger seems to bring Dean’s swagger to the fore, and Lucas wonders if it’s from watching wisecracking crimefighters on telly or if it’s just innate.

A scrapyard is also excellent for blunt instruments, as his pursuers soon find out.  

There’s a simple joy in gut-kicking an opponent that Lucas will never tire of. A rare moment of straightforward action in his shades-of-grey world.

Dean was not a million miles off, earlier, when he said he’d make a good spy. He weighs into the fight willingly, spots danger in the distance.

‘You’re a lot faster than me,’ Lucas says, mostly referring to his running.

‘That’s ‘cos I’m not an old man like you,’ Dean shoots back, and Lucas would have shoved him if he wasn’t already running again.

But Christ, yes, when he was sixteen, anyone over thirty was old. He’s old enough to be Dean’s dad, and not even in a schoolboy accident way.

 

What he has to do every day weighs on him, sometimes unbearably, but he can’t imagine how people raise teenagers. That’s a whole other world of pain, he thinks, as they scramble into the car and away.

He wonders what future he and Veta would have had, in another life. Kids. He can’t imagine it. Even without the past eight, nine years. The service is hard on families.

And now -

_Living is for other men._

Many things are unimaginable, now.

 

~

 

‘Told you I was good,’ Dean smirks with the superiority of youth, as the pictures appear, and Lucas wonders if he was ever that certain, that conceited.

Remembers arguing his A-Level texts with his dad; dismissing swathes of art; constructing critiques of religion.

 _Yeah_ , he thinks. _Wasn’t I just._

‘Who’s that woman?’ Dean asks, and Lucas is momentarily glad that politicians - even Foreign Secretaries - are forgettable these days. Jesus fucking Christ Dean just can’t avoid trouble, can he? How high up does this thing go?

 _Don’t go home_ texts Ros, just as he shuts Dean down and his nerves spark, adrenaline spiking cold through him. Shit. Plan B, then.

He doesn’t have a Plan B. He does have shared history, though.

‘I’m heading to the old stomping ground,’ he tells Ros, eyes on the road, shutting out Dean’s worry, his uncertainty. Maybe he can shut out his own, too.

 

~

 

_The bird a nest, the spider a web, man friendship._

 

The relief he feels when he sees Ros, and Harry, is something he’ll _never_ let them know. He focuses on facts, on speaking a language with people who understand him.

The meet is over too quickly. In the emptiness where his colleagues were, Dean is jangling his nerves.

He knows his patience is thin, knows that months of poor sleep, of too much work, of all the things he shouldn’t be doing, have crumbled the walls of his restraint.

Knows, too well, that his new peace comes with caveats. That his equilibrium is faulty, now his opposite, his counterbalance, his contrary, is half a world away.

Wonders - as Dean sulks back into the car - how Oleg gets through his days, now.

If he, too, stumbles, in this new off-kilter world of theirs.

 

~

 

Dean is sullen in the car, and Lucas balks at breaking the heavy air between them.

He wishes - not for the first time - that Five ran like CI5. Not for the lawlessness, or - god forbid - the clothes, but for the partnerships.

He could do with backup right about now.

Someone - and he thinks instinctively of Oleg’s twist of a smile - who knows his unspoken thoughts. Who slots into the jagged spaces he leaves, who steadies him.

Someone, he thinks more prosaically, who could come up with a safe plan for containing a teenage time bomb until morning.

 

* * *

 

The sky is bruising into night by the time he’s convinced they’re invisible enough to be safe, Dean’s mood still glowering and heavy between them.

Lucky he’s memorised all the London safe houses. Something to keep the world at bay in those stretched-thin sleepless night-watch hours.

Dean slouches into the bedroom, wielding his silence like a bludgeon. Lucas retreats to the back yard, shutting him out for a moment, wishing he smoked.

He must be the only man to come out of Lubyanka a non-smoker. It’s a miracle he didn’t come home a junkie. The place was knee-deep in smack.

He heard enough talk of interrogators using it as a tool, to wonder, sometimes, why Oleg never did it.

Too unsubtle, he thinks. Like using a club instead of a knife edge.

Flashes back to his night-thoughts, the glint of moonlight on a blade, the prickling shivers along Oleg’s skin.

Breathes heavily into the memory; sits down on the cold concrete back step, closes his eyes into the sight of Oleg strung bowstring taut against the cold rough wall of the cell, breath shuddering loud in the silence, eyes defiant, measureless.

Heat and mutiny coming off him like brimstone, jaw clenched tight against the knife-tip, against his own want, against Lucas’ bruising gaze.

Lucas wants so little, and so much.

 

He grins, feral, blood thrumming, and pushes his left thumb hard under Oleg’s jawbone, a blunt mirror of the knife on the other side; laughs low as Oleg’s breath stutters and his head jerks a knife prick into his skin.  

Lucas feels the pulse throb under his skin, watches the blood well thick and slow, sees Oleg’s eyes haze out of focus, his breathing shallow and harsh. Trembling with the strain of keeping still.

The air cold and dank at his back, blazing between them, loud with the stink of sweat and anger and lust; their particular chemistry.

Oleg blinks, once, slow and lazy, impossibly defiant, even as his breaths turn thready, and Lucas knows they would both fall rather than yield; this is what balances them.

But he knows, too, that falling together is its own triumph.

 

He drops his hand to Oleg’s cock, thick and warm and hard, and Oleg whines a jerky breath in, blood oozing again at his throat, pinned between Lucas’ hand relentless on his cock and the knife at his carotid.

He grins, taunting in his bonds, and Lucas can’t help but grin back, dragging the knife point down the bloody mess of his neck before casting it clattering aside to press himself hard and awkward against the fierce living bulk of him.

Oleg shudders, breath high in his throat, and meets the kiss halfway, sharp and bloody, and Lucas’s blood flares sulphur-hot in the cage of Oleg’s body, of his wrecking hands.

Pain sparks pleasure-bright on his skin; the scrape of nails and teeth and stubble, the sticky iron-tang of blood, the bruising, stuttering slide of flesh.

 

A siren wail in the distance jerks him back into himself; a cramped North London night, a scrub of garden, a chill breeze heavy with exhaust and stale lager.

He uncurls himself, fingertip bruises blooming on his thighs, jeans rough and tight across his cock, the taste of sweat and blood in his mouth.

Breathes unwillingly back into the present, off-balance.

Pushes to his feet, cramped and chilled, awkward in his body, and stalks into the kitchen, the sickly neon bright after the cool dark.

He should make tea. For Dean as well.

 

He wants to run, to fight, to _fuck_ \- wants to burn himself up; it’s worse than cabin fever, this untrammelled fire in him.

Wants to slam back into the dark solid bulk of Oleg, of teeth and scratching and bruises and pushing back. To beat himself raw and bloody on Oleg’s fists, to split his knuckles on Oleg’s bones, to fuck him like fighting.

 

Instead.

 

Instead he fills the kettle from the dripping tap. Finds teabags in the cupboard.

Things that are within his control have been few, today.  

 

* * *

 

_A dead body revenges not injuries._

 

‘Go home, Lucas,’ says Ros quietly, sounding as hollow as he feels.

The cleanup feels like it’s taken hours. He’s leaning against a handrail, looking up at the great cathedral of iron above.

 _Parents should not outlive their children, it’s against the nature of things_.

His father’s voice, low and gentle, offering steadiness in place of platitudes to some grieving mother, decades ago.

He cannot scrape Sarah’s face, the sound of her, out of his head.

Ros’ face is bleak but firm, everything unsaid. Her form of kindness. He nods, jerkily.

Leaves the mess behind.

 

~

 

In his bathroom he strips ferociously, skin suddenly crawling at the layers of sweat and blood and grime. The stink of his clothes, himself. His gut roils, acid with coffee and failure.

He turns the shower up hot to scrub the death from his skin.

Moments later he stumbles out, too hemmed in, the urge to run tearing through him, feeling the _charter’d streets_ for the first time since he got back.

He checks timetables, connections, even as he’s drying himself and getting dressed. Stuffs the nearest paperback and his music player into his coat on the run, and slams out of the door with his hair still wet.

 

~

 

Walking out of Tilbury station has the familiarity of dreams: it’s not how he remembers it, but he knows the place, knows where to go.

His blood feels like electricity in his veins, sparking nowhere, burning off him.

He walks past family homes. Wonders how his grief is not a trail of ash and tar behind him for all to see.

The air changes, freshens, chill with the breath of the river.

The Fort comes into view, squat, solid, unchanged.

Sorrow and warmth smack hard into his gut; he is fifteen again, listening to his father tell him tales of invasion and defence, the failures of history.

He strides on, holding the memory to him; comforting and melancholy. A familiar ache.

A lesson he has learned, these last years; old griefs can give consolation, in the face of newer pain.

 

It’s cold at the shoreline, no respite from the wind in these bleak flatlands.

There’s something in the smart of it that soothes him; a physical reason for his jagged insides.

He forces himself to stand, hands in pockets, breathes out.

The sky is vast and empty above him, grey and impersonal. He feels his insignificance like a blessing.

He settles into himself.

There will always be days like this, days when he does his best and still fails. This is the way of the world.

_Do all the good thou canst._

He knows his dad would think he’d done his best. He wonders if Sarah ever will.

If she’ll ever forgive him.

If she should.

 

The water tower rises battered and rusty as he tramps towards it. It’s a picture from a well-loved book, an image from a childhood film, a place he sees in dreams.

 _You’ve told me this before, Dad_ echoes across the decades, the sound of his father’s voice, of his own teenage impatience.

And his own voice, retelling those stories, in a landscape so like this, to a listener far more receptive.

_I’ll take you there one day, I think you’d like it._

A flicker of something in Oleg’s eyes, and then the wry smile, and _I’ll hold you to that, Lucas._

 

He runs a hand along the rough metal, gazes out across the water, seeing another river, feeling another bleak wind cutting at him.

Feeling the heat radiating from Oleg beside him. Listening to the lift and fall of his voice, the english falling into russian, taking poets apart; the words of long-dead writers, camouflage and declaration both.

_We know no time where we were not as now._

Lucas turning to him, grasping his arm to underscore a point, a counter-argument. Warmth seeping into the ice of his gloveless fingers, tingling, painful.

Their breath, fogged in the chill. Oleg’s cheeks, reddened by the wind.

The little pockets of time that are infinite, separate, private.

The low electric thrum in the air between them, always.

 

~

 

He walks. Not the irregular stumbling of urgency, not the slow rambling of those times with Oleg. The steady, upright walk of a man alone with nowhere to be, with the sound of the water and the vast spread of the sky.

_Sweet Thames, run softly, for I speak not loud or long._

The flatland is easy underfoot, the horizon stretching away to infinity.

The measured pace of his steps steadily easing the tautness within him.

It’s the daylight obverse to his night runs through the city. A quietness he’d forgotten. Another gift of the river.

He walks further than his memories, out into uncharted territory, hearing only the tide’s surge, letting thoughts roll untrammelled through his mind. There is room, here, for all of it.

And he can take it, now. He’d thought it was defeat, finally succumbing to the blackening need, facing the worst of himself. Surrendering to the hell-forged bond with Oleg that has transmuted them both.

Instead it’s brought a kind of freedom he never knew was possible.

 

_It’s just a change in me, something in my liberty_

 

~

 

He stands at the water’s edge, hands in his pockets, collar turned up against the wind; watches the sky darken and bruise, feels the deepening chill as the sun melts away.

_The violet hour._

Pictures Oleg, coat buttoned to his chin against the cold, watching the same glowering sky, feeling the empty air beside him. Thinking of Lucas’ stories, the tight clasp of his numb fingers.

Standing sentinel against the world with him, _though the world be a-waning._

 

He turns, finally, making his steady way back. Feels the pull of the city again, familiar, wanted. Feels the night settling around him, grounding him. The echoes in his head; his father’s gentle brogue, Oleg’s low rumble.

_Well, I’m a lucky man._

  


 

**Author's Note:**

> A russian fur hat and fur lined winter coat for [jennytheshipper](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Jennytheshipper/pseuds/Jennytheshipper) for an enthusiastic beta on this. Any remaining confusion is mine own. 
> 
> Lucas' back story to me is what he tells us, and the idea that his dad was a methodist minister made me have many thoughts and feelings, many of which have filtered through into this. Many didn't including Lucas' dad's feelings about Euston station, Dickens, Impressionist Art and other things. 
> 
> [Tilbury](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tilbury) is on the Thames Estuary, has an[ ancient fort](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tilbury_Fort) and a [water tower ](http://bwtas.blogspot.co.uk/2008/08/tilbury-radar-tower.html) which you will recognise from episode 8.04 as the place _Lucas knows where to go to meet Oleg from just one word of code on a note_. The sparse gems Lucas drops in that episode echo back into this one for me. 
> 
> works referenced: 
> 
> William Blake - [London](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/43673)
> 
> John Milton - [Paradise Lost](http://www.bartleby.com/4/401.html)
> 
> T. S. Eliot - [The Waste Land](http://www.bartleby.com/201/1.html)
> 
> William Morris - [Worldly Folly](http://www.bartleby.com/101/801.html)
> 
> John Wesley - [On Worldly Folly](http://wesley.nnu.edu/john-wesley/the-sermons-of-john-wesley-1872-edition/sermon-119-on-worldly-folly/)
> 
> The Verve - [ History](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2jmf9UQ3YIs) and [Lucky Man](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MH6TJU0qWoY) which is Lucas' theme song for this fic, in particular.


End file.
